Kim Newman - Professor Moriarty The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

‘I had to fight — to kill — to get it. I’ve had to do worse to keep alive since. They’ve not let up. They came for me at the hill station. Nearly had me, too. If letting them have the stone would save my hide, I’d wish it good riddance. But it’s not the gem they want, really. It’s the vengeance. Blighters with knives have my number. Heathen priests. That’s an end to it — they think, at any rate. Some say they did get me, and I’m a ghost…’

I’d not thought of that. He didn’t look like any ghost I’d run across, but, then again, they don’t, do they. Ghosts? Look like what you’re expecting, that is.

‘I didn’t just take this thing. I copped a fortune in other stones and gold doodads, too. Not as sacred, apparently. Though most folk who bought from me — chiselled at a penny in the pound, if that — are dead now. Even with miserly rates of fencing, I netted enough to buy out and set myself up for life. Thought I could do a lot better than Fat Amy Framington, I tell you.

‘Resigned my commission, and left for India… with the little brown men after me. More of ’em than I can count. Some odd ones, too — brown in the face, but hairy all over. White hairy, more brute than man. There are a few of ’em left in mountain country. Mi-go or yeti or Abominable Snowballs. They’re the trackers, when the priests let them off their leashes. They dogged me over India, into China… across the Pacific and through the States and the Northern Territories. Up to the Arctic with them after me on sledges… they have yeti in Canada too, Sasquatch and windigo. I heard the damned beasts hooting to each other like owls. Close scrape in New York. Had to pay off the coppers to dodge a murder charge. Steam-packet to Blighty.

‘They nearly got me again in a hotel in Liverpool, but I left six of ’em dead. Six howling bastards who won’t make further obeisance to their bloody little yellow god. Now I’m here, in London. The white man’s Kathmandu. I’ve still got this green lump. Worth a kingdom, and worth nothing…’

‘This narrative is very picturesque,’ Moriarty said, ‘though I would quibble about your strict veracity on one or two points. You could place it in the illustrated press. What I fail to perceive, Major Carew, is what exactly you want us to do?’

Carew’s eyes became hooded, shifty. For the first time, he almost smiled.

‘I heard of you in a bazaar in Peking, Professor. From a ruined Englishman who was once called Giles Conover…’

Him, I remembered. Cracksman, and a toff with it. Also enthusiastic about precious stones, though pearls were his line. Why anyone decided to set a high price on clams’ gallstones is beyond me. Conover went for whole strings. Lifted the Ingestre Necklace from Scotland Yard’s Black Museum to celebrate the centenary of the burning down of Mrs Lovett’s Fleet Street pie shop. I’ll wager you know that story. [35] See: James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest (attr.), ‘The String of Pearls: A Romance’, The People’s Periodical and Family Library, 1846–7. Sweeney Todd and Nellie Lovett (or Lovat) are remembered for gruesome crimes — throats cut in the barber’s chair, corpses recycled as meat pies — but they were, at bottom, mere thieves. The string of pearls, property of Mark Ingestre (or Ingestrie), was stolen from a sailor, Lieutenant Thornhill, who was supposed to convey it to Ingestre’s sweetheart, Johanna Oakley. Ingestre’s enquiries into Thornhill’s disappearance lead to the exposure of Todd and Lovett.

The Firm had done business with Conover. Before his spine got crushed.

‘You are… what was Conover’s expression… a consultant? Like a doctor or a lawyer?’

Moriarty nodded.

‘A consulting criminal?’

‘A simple way of stating my business, but it will suffice. Professionals — not only doctors and lawyers, but architects, detectives and military strategists — are available to any who meet their fees. Individuals or organisations have problems they have not the wits to solve, and call on those with expertise and experience to do so. Criminal individuals or organisations have problems too. If sufficiently interesting, I apply myself to the solution of such.’

‘Conover said you helped him…’

‘Advised him.’

‘…with a robbery. You — what? — drew up plans he followed? Like an engineer?’

‘Like a playwright, Major Carew. A dramatist. Conover’s problem required a certain flamboyance. Parties needed to be distracted while work was being done. I suggested a means of distraction.’

‘For a cut?’

‘A fee was paid.’

The Prof was being cagey about details. We arranged for a runaway cab to collide with a crowded omnibus at the corner of Leather Lane and St Cross Street. This convenient calamity drew away night guards at Tucker & Tarbert’s Gemstone Exchange long enough for Conover to nip in and abstract a cluster known as ‘the Bunch of Grapes’. Nobody died except a drunken Yorkshireman, but seven passengers were handily crippled — including a Member of Parliament who couldn’t explain why he was in the hansom with two tight-trousered post office boys and had to resign his seat. A fine night’s work all round.

Carew thought about it for a moment.

‘They are in London. The brown priests. The yeti. They mean to kill me and take back their green eye.’

‘So you have said.’

‘They nearly had me in Paddington two nights ago.’

The Professor said nothing.

‘Consider this an after-the-fact consultation, Moriarty,’ Carew said, taking a plunge. ‘I don’t need help in planning a crime. The crime’s done with, months ago and on the other side of the world. I need your help in getting away with it.’

It became clear. The Professor ruminated. His head oscillated. Carew hadn’t seen that before and was startled.

‘You will be killed,’ the Professor said. ‘There’s no doubt about it. In all parallel cases — you have heard of the Herncastle Heirloom, I trust [36] See: Wilkie Collins (ed.), The Moonstone, Tinsley Brothers, 1868. — the, as you call them, “little brown men” have prevailed. Unless some other ironic fate overtakes him first, the despoiler is routinely done to death by the cult. Did Conover tell you of the Black Pearl of the Borgias?’

‘He said he’d lost the use of his legs and been driven from England because of the thing, and he didn’t have it in his hands for more than a minute or two.’

‘That is so,’ Moriarty confirmed. ‘There are differences between your circumstances, between your Green Eye and his Black Pearl, but similarities also. With the Borgia pearl, the attendant problem was not presented by brown men, but by a white man, if man he can truthfully be called. The Hoxton Creeper. He has haunted the pearl through its unhappy chain of ownership, breaking the backs of all who try to keep hold of it. He crushed Conover’s bones to powder, though the prize was already fenced. I dare say the Creeper, a London-born Neanderthal atavism, is as abominable as any Himalayan snowman.’

Some in dire situations are gloomily happy to know others have been in the same boat. Not Carew.

‘Hang the Creeper,’ he exclaimed. ‘There’s only one of him. I’ve a whole congregation of Creepers, Crawlers and Crushers after me!’

‘So, you must die and that’s all there is to it.’

The last remaining puff went out of Mad Carew. He might as well change his daredevil nickname to Dead Carew and be done with it.

‘…and yet…’

Now the Prof’s eyes glowed, as other eyes glowed when the emerald was in view. His blood was up. Profit didn’t really stir Moriarty. He loved the numbers, not the spoils they tallied. It was the problem. The challenge. Doing that which no one else had done, which no one else could do.